Category: nannystate

Up Or Down?

Gradually Then Suddenly Great Reset It's Probably Nothing nannystate 8 Comments

A frequent topic for discussion these days is the direction of interest rates. It’s not surprising, given that the rate of interest is pretty much central to determining where the economy is headed. In a recent Substack post, I offer my own thoughts on where things are headed. In a nutshell, it’s not looking good, given the inescapable nature of our fiat currency system.

…irredeemable fiat currencies have no means of extinguishing debt. Past bonds can only be “rolled” by issuing new bonds which must at least be sufficient to at least cover the interest and principal of the previous bond. However, the new bond carries an interest charge on its own. The burden of past debt is simply shifted to newer IOUs. Because no final payment, in aggregate, is ever possible, interest and principal can only compound and grow exponentially. The process can be slowed down, but it cannot be stopped or reversed.

This creates what can be termed a “doom loop” of rising debt. The typical retort is that borrowers can always “inflate” their way out of that debt by progressively gutting the value of the fiat currency in question. In reality, this reduction of value offers no escape. While each unit of currency might command less value, the fact that they originate as part of a perpetual bond ensures that you owe exponentially more of them.

Be Afraid

Media nannystate Tommy Douglas: Not Dead Enough 26 Comments

Be very, very…afraid.

Telegraph- Don’t go outside in the morning or evening, NHS warns as Britain braces for snow

The advice comes as an amber cold weather alert has been issued across England for the next week. The UKHSA upgraded an earlier yellow warning to amber, warning of “significant impacts” on health services. According to the agency, amber alerts are issued when health and social care is impacted and there is “potential for the whole population to be at risk”.

Sounds serious. How cold is it going to get?

Temperatures could fall as low as -8C on Thursday night in rural southern Scotland and northern England, the Met Office said. It will also be cold in rural Wales and the south-west of England, with -6C expected.

A Culture in Decline

Let Them Eat Taser nannystate Safe and Effective 42 Comments

The fact that only around a third of Canadians found the pandemic measures excessive is troubling. One must assume that the other two thirds were either okay with the measures or felt they were insufficient.

Thirty-six per cent of Canadians agree with the notion that government reactions to the pandemic were exaggerated, according to the poll by Leger for the Association for Canadian Studies (ACS).

People in the Prairies and Alberta were more likely to have a negative perception of the decisions taken by government. Forty-seven per cent of Albertans and 45 per cent of Manitoba and Saskatchewan respondents agreed the COVID response was exaggerated.

But the “much too much, almost zealotry, related to being vaccinated” also came back to haunt public health officials, said Bowman, who has spoken out about how the unvaccinated were demonized as right-wing radicals. The vaccine passports and mandates had a politically polarizing impact, creating an “us-vs-them” mentality, he said.

Smear Campaign

Freespeechers nannystate 30 Comments

Now that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is playing on the other team, it’s clear that the knives are out. Heather Heying and Brett Weinstein review a recent hit piece in The Atlantic regarding RFK’s promotion of cooking with beef fat as opposed to seed oils, as if advocating the use of animal fat could never by anything but a conspiracy theory. The article is a classic example of pre-emptive stigmatization. As Heying relates:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s view on fats is is about bucking convention, not promoting health. And so let’s just start with that with that subtitle, which again, the author, you know, may not have anything to do with the title of the subtitle, but I’ve seen this critique before. It’s, oh, he’s just a contrarian. And we’ve been called just contrarians. And it’s one of actually the most insipid and wrong and ridiculous contentions that actual scientists can be can be slapped with.

Avalanche Alert

Gradually Then Suddenly It's Probably Nothing nannystate 17 Comments

Will the camel’s back finally break in 2025?

Ten thousand illegals showing up at our borders “would throw our system completely off kilter,” he warns. CBSA is still dealing with the aftermath of 492 Sri Lankan Tamils arriving in British Columbia on a Thai cargo ship in 2010…

And while Immigration Minister Marc Miller cautions “not everyone is welcome here” — and promises he’ll enforce the rules — it’s difficult to paint over Canada’s well-established reputation as a country that rolls out the red carpet to asylum seekers. Each year, thousands of migrants enter Canada, without authorization, between official ports of entry.

 

Economic Illiteracy

Canada’s Bolsheviks Gradually Then Suddenly nannystate Shiny Pony 26 Comments

So Canadians just don’t have the right vibes now? Is a recession defined by a “vibe deficit” or something like that? This is just more “animal spirits” nonsense.

Federal Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said on Monday that she hopes her government’s proposed GST holiday will help bridge the gap between Canada’s macroeconomic picture and historically stressed-out households by bringing good vibes to the latter.

“People have been talking about a ‘vibecession’… and the fact that Canadians just aren’t feeling that good,” Freeland told reporters at a press conference in Ottawa to promote the temporary sales-tax reprieve.

Losing Money Is Our Business

Gradually Then Suddenly Great Moments In Socialism nannystate 18 Comments

Can we just defund this thing too? It’s broken beyond repair.

Canada Post reported a before tax loss of $315 million for the third quarter of 2024, widening its deficit by $25 million compared to the same period last year. The decline was attributed to ongoing challenges in its parcels segment, where revenue fell 5.8 per cent as volumes declined by 9.6 per cent. The report cited “a highly competitive and demanding parcel delivery market” as the key factor behind the drop.

Kier Starmer’s Britain

Freespeechers nannystate Surveillance State 19 Comments

Where the foxes caper unmolested, the government packs your school lunch and well, the Magna Carta had a good run.

A Nice Parting Gift

entitlement generation Gradually Then Suddenly It's Probably Nothing nannystate 20 Comments

Most wage earners would not be surprised to see a recession in the near future; for many, it’s already begun as prices have outstripped wage growth for many months.

Over 20.5% accumulated inflation over the past four years, government deficit spending has reached nearly $2 trillion annually despite record tax receipts and a growing economy, public debt has reached almost $36 trillion, and the monthly job figure includes an astonishing 43,000 new government jobs each month. In 2023, nearly 25% of all job gains were government ones, and the entirety of the growth of the labor force in the past four years came from foreign workers.

The Biden-Harris administration has left a massive time bomb for Trump and Elon Musk’s government efficiency office…

Unicorn Economics

entitlement generation Gradually Then Suddenly It's Probably Nothing nannystate 24 Comments

There’s no magic formula that’s going to make a ponzi scheme sound, but that doesn’t stop a lot of academics from trying to find one. I also have to wonder how the author comes to the conclusion that Canadians pay less taxes than they used to.

The income taxes paid by Canadian millennials are being squeezed by population aging. The typical 35-year-old now pays approximately 20-per-cent to 40-per-cent more for boomers’ healthy retirements than boomers paid as young people to support the smaller number of seniors in their day.

This extra tax burden will only get heavier in the years ahead as Ottawa enacts planned increases for Old Age Security (OAS) and the Canada Health Transfer, and provinces increase medical spending for their aging populations.

Pipeline Of Losses

Climate Cult Gradually Then Suddenly It's Probably Nothing nannystate 14 Comments

It’s somewhat ironic that the NDP are criticizing a government agency for losing money, but maybe that’s just a bug in their code, not a feature. I’m sure they’ll correct the error soon.

Trans Mountain Corporation CEO Mark Maki said the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion was “worth the cost” in a Monday appearance in Ottawa, even with the inflated price tag of $34 billion.

NDP MP Charlie Angus said he couldn’t square the pipeline’s high purported resale value with the fact that it’s currently selling product at a loss to attract customers.

Angus speculated that the federal government was using a subsidiary “shell company”, TMP Finance Ltd., to hide the project’s losses.

Wise Words

Gradually Then Suddenly It's Probably Nothing nannystate 10 Comments

One of the less well-known economists of the Austrian School was Professor Antal Fekete who died in 2020. Fekete arguably had a much better grasp of monetary issues than many of his contemporaries. His works are still available on his website, and one in particular details why debt must necessarily grow exponentially in a fiat currency system.

Every year monetary authorities must create at least as much new money as needed to service outstanding debt, in order to keep the game of musical chairs going.

Governments have lost not only their option to reduce indebtedness but, more ominously, the option to balance their budgets. There is a new item in the budget that is never named, that is well-hidden, but that is increasing by leaps and bounds year after year: that part of government borrowing that is needed to provide cover for the increase of the monetary base.

The utterances of politicians about their resolve to eliminate the budget deficit is disingenuous – it cannot be done under the prevailing monetary regime on a net basis.

Your Home Is Not Your Castle

Canada’s Bolsheviks Gradually Then Suddenly It's Probably Nothing nannystate 36 Comments

When a society accepts the premise that those with wealth deserve to have it strip mined, nothing is off limits.

Governments’ extraction of value from our homes has accelerated in recent years as they have became more desperate, both to raise revenue and to find scapegoats to deflect blame for their own starring role Canada’s housing shortage. As the byzantine extractions multiplied, our homes, once considered our main assets, have morphed for many into our main liabilities. Once upon a time, “safe as houses” was a no-brainer investment strategy. Anyone who now sees a house as a safe investment needs his head examined.

Tax Me Harder!

Canada’s Bolsheviks Gradually Then Suddenly It's Probably Nothing nannystate 20 Comments

It’s too bad that the Conservatives continue to remain largely silent on the critical issue of repealing Justin’s capital gains tax hikes. The impact is far from trivial.

Based on conventional assumptions that an increase in the tax-inclusive cost of capital by 10 percent causes the capital stock to fall by 7 percent, I estimate that Canada’s capital stock would fall by $127 billion. Employment would permanently decline by 414,000. To put this in terms of its impact on unemployment, the capital gains tax hike would increase unemployment from 1.5 to 1.9 million Canadian workers as of August 2024. GDP will fall by almost $90 billion and real per capita GDP by 3 percent.

 

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